Sunday, January 15, 2017

Your First Conference Presentation and Amazing Coincidences

Do you remember the first professional conference presentation that you ever gave on your research?

I suspect that no matter how many years ago or how recent it was that you remember it very well.

In fact, I even recall the outfit that I wore but, then again, I was the only female presenter at the conference and, not surprisingly, the only one wearing a skirt suit, which was bright blue. There were numerous MIT professors in the audience and several admirals as well.

I decided to write on "your first conference presentation" not only because one of my doctoral students is giving hers this week at the INFORMS Computing Society (ICS) Conference, which is taking place, January 15-17, 2017 in Austin, Texas, but also because of an amazing coincidence between her first talk and my first talk. It is coincidences such as these or may I say, "serendipity," that makes being an operations researcher so much fun, interesting, and filled with surprises. And some of the surprises and special delights involve the great people in our profession.

This morning, my doctoral student, Deniz Besik, who last week endured a 12 hour wait at the Istanbul airport for her flight back to Boston because of snow there, and finally made it back from a winter break, emailed me the photo below of herself with a "celebrity" that she met at the ICS Conference.

I smile every time I look at this photo because guess who was on the program of the first conference that I ever spoke at - indeed, Professor Bertsekas!

That conference was the second MIT/ONR Workshop on Distributed Communication and Decision Problems Motivated by Naval C^3 Systems. It took place at the Naval Postgraduate School in beautiful Monterey, California. I was working at Systems Consultants then in Newport, Rhode Island, and had not even completed my Master's degree from Brown University. In fact, this was also my first publication since the conference resulted in a 4 volume refereed proceedings.

What is also quite amazing is that I ended up continuing at Brown University for my PhD in Applied Mathematics, with a specialty in Operations Research, and my advisor was Professor Stella Dafermos, who was a good friend of Bertsekas'. Yes, they are both Greek. She passed away at age 49 but left a tremendous intellectual legacy.

About Me

is the John F. Smith Memorial Professor of Operations Management at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College at Oxford University for the 2016 Trinity term.
She was a Visiting Professor at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden for 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015.
Her latest book, co-edited with I. Kotsireas and P.M. Pardalos is: Dynamics of Disasters: Key Concepts, Models, Algorithms, and Insights, published by Springer in 2016. She is also the co-author of the book: Competing on Supply Chain Quality: A Network Economics Perspective, with D. Li, and published in 2016.
She is the author of the book: Networks Against Time: Supply Chain Network Analytics for Perishable Products, co-authored with M. Yu, A.H. Masoumi, and L.S. Nagurney.
She is also the author, with Q. Qiang, of the book: Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain World, and several other books.
She is the Founding Director of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks.